Students win Major Networking Competiton

Great team work and good tutors have been the secret of success for the winners of a major national computer networking competition.

Jonathan Gan and Phil Carman, Wellington Institute of Technology Bachelor of Information Technology students, made for a winning combination, when they took on teams from other tertiary institutes around the country in the New Zealand Cisco CCNA NetRider’s Competition. The team will now head to Cisco Headquarters in Wellington, on 25 October, to compete in the Asia Pacific APAC NetRider’s Competition.

“Team work is a big thing in IT, especially with the need for problem solving,” Mr Gan of Wellington says. “We are pretty good at bouncing ideas off each other.”

The support and encouragement the students have received from their tutors at WelTec has also contributed to their success, explains Mr Carmen of Lower Hutt.  “My tutor is a Cisco Certified Network Professionals and the Petone campus also has a Cisco Lab,” he says. “This really benefits students.” Two students from the programme also won the New Zealand Cisco competition last year.

The men decided to team up for the competition after studying together for three years. “We communicate well, something which is important for success,” says Mr Carman. “When you are employed in the industry and work on configuration problem solving, you usually have to work with someone else at the end of a phone or Skype for instance, so relaying information well is vital.”

Both students are delighted with their win. “The competition is a good platform for graduates emerging into the industry to be viewed by potential employers from international companies,”  Mr Gan says.

The competition involved over an hour of networking questions and practical trouble-shooting. The next round will see this time period extended to over two hours with teams from countries in Australia and Asia also competing. The team will also have to contend with Cisco’s digital technology platform, TelePresence. Mr Gan says he was encouraged by family members already working in the industry to study information technology at WelTec. “Many employers feel it is the first port of call for graduates from IT particularly in Networking.”